Yinong Yang

Disassembly is a key step in most end-of-life (EoL) product recycling strategies. Traditional disassembly entails paradigmatic and technological shifts to support process planning. Industry 5.0 and X-reality (XR) are notable representatives in this context. With the extension of societal transformation, Industry 5.0 aims to build a human-technology or human-machine companion to emphasize the importance of human safety and well-being. XR encompasses virtual and augmented reality technologies and addresses the human-reality gap in virtual worlds. By leveraging XR to simulate and visualize product information and experimental operations, disassembly planning can be facilitated. However, the roles of Industry 5.0 and XR in EoL disassembly remain underexplored, and the existing literature has neglected the possibility of linking them with lean. This paper first reviewed the extant literature on the potential association of Industry 5.0, lean, and XR for disassembly planning, offering one of the first research articles to highlight current trends. This paper further presented the preliminary work by constructing a tri-dimensional framework to combine three paradigms of human-centric, smart, and lean in the disassembly domain under Industry 5.0. Our findings not only underline the emerging gaps and the unexplored areas but also offer a valuable framework to advance digital disassembly transformation.

In parallel with the fast growth of the second-hand aviation market, the importance of promoting remanufacturing analytics has increased. However, end-of-life (EoL) aircraft parts remanufacturing operations are still underdeveloped. Disassembly, the most challenging and central activity in remanufacturing, directly affects the EoL product recovery’s profitability and sustainability. Disassembly sequence planning (DSP) devises ordered and purposeful parting for all potentially recoverable components before physical separations. However, the complexities and uncertainties of the EoL conditions engender unpredictable DSP decision inputs. The EoL DSP needs emergent evidence of cost-effective solutions in view of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) implications and stakeholders’ benefits. Among the I4.0 technologies, X-reality (XR) particularly hits the mainstream as a cognitive and visual tool consisting of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Recently, with the advance of I4.0 phenomenon, lean management has been theorized and tested through complementary collaboration. Since the research of integrating lean and XR into the EoL DSP is underexplored in literature, XR and lean are investigated as assistive enablers in the DSP. This study has a two-fold purpose: (1) identifying the key concepts of DSP, I4.0, XR, and lean, and extending the literature by reviewing the previous efforts of EoL aircraft remanufacturing, XR-assisted DSP, and XR–lean applications; (2) proposing “Smart Disassembly Sequence Planning (SDSP)” as a new EoL decision-support agenda after analyzing relational advantages and evolving adaptability. The barriers and limitations are highlighted from the recent associated topics, concrete academic information for developing digitalized disassembly analytics is provided, and new trends are added for future disassembly research.